Centenary Sermon by Fr Richard Duffield Cong Orat

Fr Robert Byrne preaching on 12th March

St Gregory & St
Augustine’s

Monday, March 12th
, 2012

Attendite ad petram unde excisi estis

On the sanctuary of Ampleforth Abbey church there is a small
plaque within which is embedded a medieval tile from the sanctuary of
Westminster Abbey. Ampleforth claims a direct descent from the monks of the
ancient foundation. Inscribed on the plaque are these words from the Prophet
Isaiah, Attendite ad petram unde excisi
estis(Look to the rock from which
you are hewn). It is an invitation, perhaps more. It is a command, to make
ourselves aware of our past, of our traditions, where we come from, of the treasure
that our ancestors have left us. Invitation or command, at the centenary Mass
of the parish and church of St Gregory it seems an appropriate course to
follow. I would like to thank Fr John and the parishioners for honouring me
with this invitation to come and preach tonight. I am very much at home!

There is, in this command, a further coded meaning. The arms
of Ampleforth Abbey contain the cross keys of St Peter, a reference to the
dedication of St Edward the Confessor’s foundation. So when we are invited to “Look
to the rock!”, it is to St Peter too, that we are being directed, the rock on
which our Church is built. It is the Gospel of today’s Mass of Pope St Gregory
the Great: “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church.” Before I
conclude – to let you know when to wake up – I will return to St Peter and to
Westminster so that

the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

But for now, let us go somewhere completely different.

The Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, once a curate down
the road at St Aloysius, wrote two poems about shipwrecks, a famous one, The Wreck of the Deutschland, and one
less well-known, The Loss of the
Eurydice. In both poems he uses the wreck as a metaphor for the tragic
rupture of the Reformation and the loss of England for the Catholic faith. In
the earlier poem, he asks the brave nun drowned in the wreck of the Deutschland
off the coast of Kent to pray for the return of England to Catholic truth:

Dame,
at our door

Drowned,
and among our shoals,

Remember
us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward:

Our
King back, oh, upon English souls.

And some years later, in The Loss of the Eurydice hewrote:

Deeply
surely I need to deplore it,

Wondering
why my master bore it,

The
riving off that race

So
at home, time was, to his truth and grace.

If this seems an odd place to start a
sermon for the centenary of St Gregory and St Augustine then the following small
and sad co-incidence may make my purpose clearer. On the night of Sunday, 14th
April, 1912, an iceberg struck the RMS Titanic on her maiden voyage from
Southampton to New York with the loss of one thousand, five hundred and
seventeen souls. That same Sunday morning the first public Mass was celebrated
here in this church. It was Low Sunday, the Sunday after Easter. (The dates are
just one day later this year!) The project was an act of faith. The area was only
just beginning to grow. The Directory for the following year lists the Catholic
population as sixty.

The donor of the land and the money
to build was Mr Charles Robertson, a convert of Brighton and Begbroke. Received
by the Servite Friars at their church in Fulham Road, London, he had already
been very generous to the Church, building a priory for the Servites at
Begbroke and buying a house there, which he named St Charles’s, for the use of
diocesan clergy wishing to pursue studies in the University of Oxford. Charles
Robertson was a man of vision. His generosity was rewarded by Rome with a papal
honour. He was a Knight of St Gregory. So, having named the Begbroke house
after his patron saint it is not too far-fetched to suppose that he named his
church for his Roman title.

The priest with the energy to match
Charles Robertson’s vision was Canon, and later Monsignor, and later still,
though only briefly, Bishop Michael Glancey. He was at this time resident at
Begbroke, and as well as being Warden of St Charles’s House, he was also the
Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Birmingham. It is from the extensive
correspondence between these two men, now preserved in the archives of the
Archdiocese, that we know so much about the early years of St Gregory’s and the
foundation of the parish. The letters date from 1908 until the early 1920s but,
annoyingly, it is clear that there were many letters before that date which
dealt with their early ideas about the new parish.

I have here a photocopy of one of those
letters, written a hundred years ago today, Tuesday, 12th March,
1912. In it, we hear for the first time, the name of the first parish Priest of
St Gregory and St Augustine’s, Fr Arthur Sammons.

Ecce, Agnus Dei!

Dear
Canon Glancey, I have received a letter
this morning from the Archbishop telling me he is going to appoint a Fr Sammons
to the new mission and I have no doubt the choice of His Grace will be a good
one. I do not see any account of him in the Secular Clergy list of your
directory. I understand that Fr Sammons will go in a few days to reside with
you at Begbroke and spend the time between now and Easter in hunting up the
Catholics of North Oxford, that is the best thing he could do...

It would have been nice to have
brought the original letter from Birmingham. But archivists are jealous of
their treasures and rightly so. They know that even the most insignificant
thing becomes precious with age and can speak powerfully to us of the past. This
is nowhere more true than in matters of the faith. That very ordinary letter,
written a hundred years ago, brings back to us the image of Fr Sammons, newly
arrived in Oxford, setting out, at just this time of the year, on his rather
daunting mission in those less tolerant days, of hunting up the Catholics of
North Oxford. Let’s hope it was not so bad as the diary entry made by Scott of
the Antarctic on the very same day:

I doubt if we can
possibly do it. The surface remains awful, the cold intense, and our physical
condition running down. God help us!

Every age has its own troubles. If
the respectable anti-Catholicism of Edwardian England is no more then it has
been replaced by an intolerance towards all forms of religious truth and by a
fairly universal disregard for wisdom inherited from the past. The mission of
spreading the Gospel of Christ is challenging in every age.

Let us look at a different letter. St
Augustine and his companions, having set out from Rome to fulfil their mission,
heard awful stories in France of what lay in store for them across the Channel.
It wasn’t just the food. The fearful missionaries turned back. Hearing of this
in Rome, Pope Gregory wrote to them in a letter that has been preserved for us
by St Bede:

Gregory, the servant of the servants of God, to the
servants of our Lord. Forasmuch as it
had been better not to begin a good work, than to think of desisting from that
which has been begun, it behoves you, my beloved sons, to fulfil the good work,
which, by the help of our Lord, you have undertaken. Let not, therefore, the toil
of the journey, nor the tongues of evil speaking men, alter you; but with all
possible earnestness and zeal perform that which, by God's direction, you have
undertaken; being assured, that much labour is followed by an eternal reward.

St Gregory’s project of converting the heathen English was
very much his personal mission. The Roman empire was collapsing, civilisation
was in retreat, such Christians as were left in these islands had fled to the
margins of Wales and Scotland. The pagans from the north were conquering the by
the sword. No wonder Augustine and his fellow monks were afraid. Everything
they valued was threatened; they felt under siege.

Yet St Gregory had a very important project to complete,
nothing less than to recreate the unity of the Roman Empire, not by might of
its army but by the power of the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The
sensitivity of the Pope towards the English was extraordinary even by our own
standards, let alone the standards of his age. He instructed his missionaries
never to coerce the English, to keep their pagan sanctuaries intact, simply
sprinkling them with holy water to consecrate them for the worship of the true
God. Let them learn, he said, by taking gentle steps. Do not ask them to make a
giant leap. St Bede’s account of King Ethelbert’s policy once he had been
converted is remarkable:

He compelled none to
embrace Christianity, but only showed more affection to the believers, as to
his fellow ­citizens in the heavenly kingdom. For he had learned from his instructors
and leaders to salvation, that the service of Christ ought to be voluntary, not
by compulsion.

There is surely a lesson here, in a country still nominally
Christian, in the right attitude of the State towards the Church.

Reading the letters of Charles Robertson and Canon Glancey,
we find there a concern for the simplicity and the beauty and the quality
of the church they were building. There
is page after page of precise
instructions for the fixtures and fittings of the building we are now sitting
in. I quote only one, from August 1911:

I seem as if I was
never to be out of trouble and expense over Apsley: I have spent so much
already and had so many worries I am tempted to wish I had never bought the
property. I don't grudge anything spent
on the chapel, indeed that I have thus been instrumental in bringing the
secular clergy to Oxford and therefore one step nearer to making use of the
University is about the only consolation I have over the whole thing. I am glad
you think so well of its appearance since the scaffolding came down. It is a
great thing for a church or chapel to look light and bright; a dark, gloomy
church helps to make religion morbid, I think.

I quote this letter from all the others because in it we see
can see the trials involved in attempting anything good. But we can also see
the concern the founders had for the learning of the clergy and the beauty of
the building. Both are vital for the mission of the Church. It is the authentic
spirit of the Blessed John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement which at its
best is never about controversy for its own sake but rather a serious attempt
to get beyond the arguments of the Reformation and reconnect the Church with
its primitive and apostolic past.

It is this spirit that animates the beautiful building and
the parish whose centenary we are celebrating today. It is still more the
spirit that animated our patron saints Gregory and Augustine. The church they
founded in England was consciously founded on the words of the Gospel and the
teaching of the apostolic Fathers. It lasted for a thousand years until the
tragic shipwreck of the Reformation and the destruction of the unity of Western
Christendom. It looked back to the rock
from which it was hewn.

From the midst of the narrow controversies of the
Reformation, the great St Thomas More, in the midst of his trial in Westminster
Hall, appealed to St Gregory, to a more ancient and more universal vision of
the Church:

As St Paul said of the
Corinthians, “I have regenerated you in Christ”, so might St Gregory (of whom
through St Augustine we first received the Faith) truly say of the English,
“You are my children, for I have regenerated you in Christ.

Today the circumstances may be different but the mission is
the same. Like St Gregory and St Augustine, and like those who built this
Church, we are called to build in our own days a culture founded on the
goodness, truth and the beauty of the Gospel. In our different ways it is the
same mission for us all, whether we our circumstances are wealthy or modest,
whether we be bishop, priest or lay person.

In September 2010, our present Holy Father, Pope Benedict
addressed both Houses of Parliament in the same Westminster Hall where St
Thomas More was tried. As Pope St
Gregory spoke to the political leaders of his time, in our own time his
successor spoke to the people with power. He reminded us again that ins some
ways nothing changes:

The fundamental
questions at stake in Thomas More’s trial continue to present themselves in
ever-changing terms as new social conditions emerge.

A short time later, speaking in Westminster Abbey Pope
Benedict invited us all to look once more to the rock from which we are hewn
and to take up once more the mission of sanctifying our age. He acknowledged
the great difficulties involved in overcoming the divisions of the past and in
speaking to the troubled world of our time. He called us to look again at
tradition and St Peter’s ministry of unity.

Fidelity to the word
of God, precisely because it is a true word, demands of us an obedience which
leads us together to a deeper understanding of the Lord’s will, an obedience
which must be free of intellectual conformism or facile accommodation to the
spirit of the age. This is the word of encouragement which I wish to leave with
you this evening, and I do so in fidelity to my ministry as the Bishop of Rome
and the Successor of Saint Peter, charged with a particular care for the unity
of Christ’s flock.

Gathered in this
ancient monastic church, we can recall the example of a great Englishman and
churchman whom we honour in common: Saint Bede the Venerable. At the dawn of a
new age in the life of society and of the Church, Bede understood both the
importance of fidelity to the word of God as transmitted by the apostolic
tradition, and the need for creative openness to new developments and to the
demands of a sound implantation of the Gospel in contemporary language and
culture.

We may feel threatened and besieged. We may feel shipwrecked
or alone. The task is truly great. But others have been here before. As we celebrate
a hundred years of faith in this
beautiful and much loved church, may we receive with gratitude the gifts that
have been handed down by those who gave all this to us, and accept from them
the challenge to take our part in making visible the goodness, beauty and truth
of the Catholic faith here in our own time and place.